Nuclear Power Alt Media PR Comeback?

One of the weirder trends I see on alt-media is a resurgence of interest in nuclear power as a "green" alternative to fossil fuel power production even in the wake of not-so-long-ago Fukushima. I even see some youtubers cheerleading the money hungry nuclear weapons stockpiles of the US. ($30B-$50B per year to maintain) My guess is some buzz cut korea war era bureaucrats spent some money to promote nukes on the Internets before they went to their retirement parties.

I think this is a generational thing. If you were at least 10 years old in 1986 you'd be 42 years old today and would probably remember the news reports of the Chernobyl disaster, and if you're older you will remember Three Mile Island.

If your memory is good enough, and you meditate on these topics a while, eventually a whole cornucopia of corporate sociopathy will bloom before your mind's eye, such as the Bhopal Disaster which killed thousands of people. If you're in your forties you remember EPA superfund sites, Love Canal and leaded gasoline. Eventually the millenials and gen-Zers will be paying for all the fracking site well failures and ruing the energy boom.

Corporate sociopathy is really the concentrated lack of concern and recklessness of a million individuals all concentrated into singular events and accidents and accumulated pollution and destruction. One such example I saw this past summer was herbicide application along the high voltage powerlines a mile from my house. In a typical year, they brushhog the powerlines in the fall, but last year, probably to save some shekels, they sprayed trees and fields from helicopters during the peak of the bird breeding season. It turned my stomach to see it, but my lights are on and I'm paying my electric bill monthly, dutifully.

Nuclear power is that sociopathy plus the delusion that industrial civilization will persist forever and that the schemes of some engineers will thwart nature indefinitely and that our current mode of living will go on for hundreds if not thousands of years or that the shitty power companies or the governments of today will last in perpetuity. Even if something like the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis is incorrect, the period between civilization ending events is shorter than the lifespan of nuclear waste. Rome couldn't even maintain sewers for more than a couple of centuries. Fuck. Michigan can't even maintain some WW2 era water lines.

I think a hail mary internet PR effort by the nuclear industry isn't enough to revive it. It's too expensive to build new plants and the end-of-life costs of the old plants are yet to be known as they transition into long term waste storage facilities.

Backlash Versus White Flight

From my POV, the whole Internet counterculture was powered by a serious loss in the credibility of "mainstream" institutions after 9/11 and the subsequent wars and the bank bailouts and financial crisis of 2008. The 2016 election put the cherry on top. Mainstream media figures were exposed as being in direct collusion with the Clinton campaign. At the same time, culture wars issues flare up left and right on social media. It seems like there's an ongoing polarization of the public, not only in the United States but throughout the western world, and perhaps the "silent majority" is getting ready to tell the screechy minority to STFU.

I think rather than a physical confrontation between the lefty establishment and "the new right" or the populists, or whatever they're called, the old establishment institutions will one by one face "white flight" (really yeomanry flight).

Elf World: Productivity without Rearrangement?

There are many movies and books that made an attempt at imagining the Garden of Eden/Elf world. Avatar and Lord of the Rings come to mind immediately. There's a similar race of beings in Stargate SG-1, the Nox. Native americans and other indiginous people are often depicted as in-tune with nature or a part of nature and as opposed to technological and industrial civilization.

These characters are often passive and or backdrop characters to the main action in a plot, because they're sort of a stand in and characterization of Nature. They're also pretty vaguely imagined because there's no Elf World or Garden of Eden canon to draw upon, while the Atlantis and city on a hill world has been a topic of thought and discussion for thousands of years.

There are basically two categories of strategies that one can imagine for Elf World agriculture. One is to maximize the productivity of a small area by intensive arrangement of materials and systems, which then opens up larger areas for wild plants and animals. The other is in-nature agriculture, with some clever method of harvesting and storing crops that's not resource intensive at all.

In the Avatar world, the creatures live in a world of overflowing abundance, so nature provides everything they need to survive and thrive without any technology or artifice. Even their transportation is provided for by nature.

Can you have high agricultural productivity without arranging resources for convenient harvest, or without at the minimum building a fence? Probably not.

Why the Internet is Corrosive to Institutional Authority

Colleges and universities are probably the next institutions that the internet will annihilate. The internet is corrosive to authority because "authorities" were like the central nervous system of the meta-animals of society. They had a monopoly on the collection, dissemination, and centralization of information, but now the internet is a much better central nervous system. Many of the functions of institutions like banks, governments, and academia can be replicated by internet based systems for very low cost.

Colleges are probably more exposed than banks or governments. The student loan and text book rackets are pretty obvious to even casual observers, and unlike banks or governments colleges don't have much political protection obtained by bribery and blackmail.

Ironically, the STEM fields that schools are so invested in promoting and teaching are probably where colleges and universities will first lose out to the Internet. If you're smart enough to get a degree in those fields, you're smart enough to teach yourself the subject matter by watching YouTube videos. In engineering, especially in tech, university credentials are pretty close to meaningless since jobs in that field are all about doing the next new thing.

Compulsion of Speech by Fringe Groups

The lefty culture warrior people frequently attempt to compel various types of speech, like using specific pronouns or other similar nonsense, or by pressuring feckless tech companies to censor or deplatform people. Meanwhile, right wing evangelical christian groups with an Israel fetish attempt to compel allegience to the state of Israel by government contractors and employees through oaths. These groups are small but vocal. Their battle is to control hot air, because they're too fringey to control anything else.

It's easy to imagine these battles over speech leading to political violence, because those groups are small and physically weak and because compulsion of speech is a fairly extreme violation of an individual. It's sort of a playground fight scenario.

Saxon Elves and Tribal Fantasies

We watched "The Last Kingdom" on Netflix. It's pretty entertaining and I think they did a pretty good job trying to imagine and depict the pinnacle of Saxon England. It's like an ode to Saxons and most of the main characters have an old anglo-saxon name like "Aelfflaed". The Saxon names prefixed with "Aelf", like "Aelfred" are concatenations of "Aelf = Elf" with some other word, which makes me think of the Lord of the Rings and circles back to a topic I sort of shelved a while back: frozen tribal conflict.

The idea of Saxon England is like Atlantis in a lot of ways. It's idealizable because it's lost. Are tribal societies any closer to "natural" for human life than Empires? Maybe not. A tribe is really an abstraction of family, but it's not a family. Tribal life could be arranged and maintained with every bit as much artifice, fraud, and parasitism as Empire life.

Negative-space Civilization Critiques

Some people view corporate and institutional life as the essential expression of what it means to be human, and see the life of the administrator as the ultimate human life. There's an opposing, long standing tradition and maybe genetic disposition to hating institutional and corporate life. More contemporary writers like Edward Abbey present the same themes as a guy like Diogenes of Sinope did a couple millenia ago: political man and corporate man are dimunitions of what it means to be a human being, and the delusions of would be Alexanders are toxic to everyone, including Alexander himself.

Corporate and institutional life lead unerringly toward empire and centralization. Centralization leads to corruption and stagnation and dissipation of all virtue. The leviathan, the system that was conjured up to protect all devours all as it replaces the cues and guidance of natural necessity with its own.

The critiques of people like Diogenes are sort of negative-space, "not-do" advice, though. There's not a real formulation of what man's place in nature actually is. This critique is really the missing-garden-of-Eden critique. Fallen world man is city-man and institutional man. The sort of environmentalism espoused by a guy like Abbey or Richard Proenneke addresses some of the leviathan-system problems of civilization.

Globalism: Worldwide Elite Imperialism

I got my first real professional job in the early 1990s. The company I worked for had been recently purchased by a large French conglomerate and was in the early stages of moving some local production facilities to India.

The people who were tasked with setting up the factory in India weren't eager about doing it and saw it as pointless, and a betrayal of their fellows. The jobs that were being eliminated were skilled labor jobs, but were some of the lower paying jobs in that company, so the amount that would be saved and returned to the company shareholders and management was pretty meager compared to the initial investment in the new facilities and also the inevitable decline in quality that came from replacing a skilled and trained pool of workers with a brand new unskilled pool of workers. Anyway, many years later, long after I left, that company basically imploded after a series of missteps and low cost competition from abroad. Live by the sword, etc...

Many manufacturing businesses in the USA and around the world were doing the same thing at the same time. They were helped along by recently passed laws and treaties that were abandoning what the LaRouche people call "the American System" in favor of something that resembled the British Empire, which always was a corporate empire.

The elites of this empire are a rando hodgepodge of business lizards of every nationality who absorb credit from the money printing banks while they and their patronage networks espouse left wing politics.

This isn't unique. It's happened over and over in history. Maybe it's just the result of a long period of stability of every kind. The "elites" with a monopoly on government positions and trade snuggle up with one another against the great unwashed hoardes of their home countries.

Faceberg Getting It From Both Sides

It'll be ineresting to see if and how quickly Faceberg can totally collapse and if that will mark the end of this tech bubble like Enron's implosion and scandals marked the end of the dot com bubble.

The west coast "tech" oligopolies of this "age of the data center" seem to be running afoul of the east coast political establishment, which seems to be totally wrapped up with the media, which is collapsing from competition with tech.

The libertarians are also starting to hate on the tech companies for being feckless and soulless supporters of cultural marxist ideologues and for being appendages of the state, even states like China.

Even normies are starting to realize faceberg is a bad actor and are starting to feel the weight of their spy app on their spy devices. The wealth of tech companies is illusory. Maybe the spell is about to be broken.

Financialization and a Split Economy

British East India Company Flag

The British East India Company flag is remarkably similar to the US flag. There are 13 stripes--supposedly for the 13 founders of the BEIC and of course the 13 original colonies in the US flag. "13" is a numeric reference, possibly, to the Knights Templar "Friday the 13th" downfall.

The modern world is the grandchild of the BEIC. It's corporate world, and corporate world is really "finance" world. The conquering armies and navies of age of exploration imperialism has been replaced with legalisms and fraud. This form of imperialism doesn't put people in chains or press them into service aboard a ship, it puts people in debt and makes them poor.

Every person, from the poorest to even the wealthiest corporate execitive in the system is playing an unwinnable game with rules that can be adjusted at any time. For poorer people, even for the middle class people, there's almost no attachment to this system. The inevitable outcome is a split economy and political split.

The Internet counterculture is the sharp edge of the political split. It seems like the political split is just in the early stages of pushing the creation of parallel economic institutions and even societal institutions.

Why is Appalachian Ohio Household Income Lower Than The Rest of the State?

Limit of the Advance of Glaciers in South East Ohio

The difference in median household income between the portion of Ohio that was covered by ice during the Pleistocene era, and the portion that wasn't is stark.

The map above is pretty old and the values are in 1999 dollars, but it shows the difference well. Generally, the per capita income and household income in Appalachia is a fraction of the wealthier portion of the state. If you scan through the areas with satellite or roadside imagery, the very subtle differences in the areas tell the story.

Both regions are in the same geographic "province" of the United States--the Allegheny Plateua. The landscape of south east Ohio is what Northeast Ohio would look like if it hadn't been glaciated. In Southern Ohio, there are rolling hills where erosion has worn down the rocks and there are more or less broad valleys where streams and rivers have formed arable land, but there are also lots of little rocky hill tops with no soil, which creates a double whammy problem. In areas with severe landscapes, travel distance is longer and more energy intensive to avoid hills, so it's really like the resources of Appalachian Ohio are diluted by a factor of 1.5 or 2.

In Northeast Ohio, the little hills were worn down by glaciers and the valleys were filled in with till so there are large regions of land with deep soil. Consequently, it was possible to support cities with larger populations. (If you look at topo map of Switzerland, you see the same patterns.)

Also Appalachian Ohio became a coal mining area while the rest of the state generated wealth with diverse industrial activity and agriculture. Resource extraction businesses are often bad at creating lasting wealth for the people because there's pretty minimal value added locally, so once the coal is used up, or becomes uneconomic, the money spigot just shuts off. Also, historically, the coal mining business was pretty malignant economically and preyed on their employees, so whatever wealth was actually created by the coal trade was sucked out of those regions leaving little behind.

Farm Truck Update: The Battle Against Decay

Muh farm truck serpentine belt broke recently because the A/C compressor was seized. Fortunately, it's a relatively inexpensive repair and if I wanted to do it myself, it'd be really cheap. I won't be surprised, though, if that incident created conditions that ultimately kill the engine. If that happens the cost per mile for this truck will end up being very high relative to all the vehicles I've owned.

In a world of all-change and perpetual decay of our property and our meat chariot bodies it can be difficult to take pleasure in small victories in a no-win war. Man's belief in his supremacy over the primal forces of our world is shown to be the vanity of Ozymondias or as futile as Gilgamesh's quest for immortality. I'm reminded of this not only by rust and mechanical breakdowns or the gray hairs on my head, but by walks around our woods.

lake deposited clay forms the bed of the creek on our property

In the last ice age, not so long ago in geological terms, the land our house is on was under water. It boggles my mind because we're on a hill that's about 100 feet above the nearest body of water: Big Creek and we're about 600 feet above Lake Erie. The landscape that we perceive as permanent is actually very young and subject to wild changes.

The glaciers that flowed over the great lakes filled up lower areas until they were stopped by higher relief landscapes and the warmer temperatures of the south. As each ice age passed, the glaciers receded back up the valleys, but sometimes ice blocked drainage channels for many years, which is possibly how the lake formed.

As water flowed along newly deposited till and glacial debris, rocks and boulders fell out first, of course, then materials like sand did, and the finest stuff, which forms clay, was carried to standing water where it settled out. Eventually the lake drained and the clay was covered over and in some places it is cut through by moving water.

United States Corporate Authoritarians and War By Other Means

It's fitting that tech companies carry out the "western" version of commie China's social credit system in the wake of GM's long con of the United States playing out in the usual way. (US taxpayers $11B in the hole. CEO paid $20M to ship jobs and manufacturing overseas.)

It's apparent that tech companies will implement a social credit system that other corporations will utilize and enforce. The Federal auhorities will bank their campaign dough and pass on taking responsibility as rights are eroded by private enterprises. 

The Revolutionary War in the United States really got kicked off by the vampire British empire abusing the colonists economically. Hopefully in our day other forms of competition and "warfare" can be utilized as alternatives to retarded old violence. It'd be much better to transform the way we live toward a more free and decentralized and sane way, rather than do another spin of the same old same old cycle.

Most of this blog is about the futility of establishing "systems" to try to solve humanity's problems. Humanism and the Enlightenment were a huge improvement on the modes of thinking of the medieval world, but in my appraisal, they've run full circle--the humanist enlightenment empire is just another shitty old empire with its own gods that limit how people think.

Lessons from the French and Indian War for Tech Companies

Many of the people who went on to found the United States were directly involved in the French and Indian War in the colonies that eventually became the United States. The F&I war was the American theater of a global conflict between the french and british empire. People like George Washington got an up close and personal look at the apparatus of the british empire and saw its weakness in North America.

Today, tech companies are inserting themselves into the culture wars nonsense on behalf of left wing ideologies and fraud politicians. This is all a result of the stupid presidential election and the fear of the "establishment" (corporate execs and NGOs) of the electoral backlash against neoliberalism, aka the political arrangement where they reap huge rewards for automation and slave labor.

Tech is the most ephemeral business there is because the underlying technologies and techniques are ephemeral. If you're 40 years old or more, you can probably remember names like Digital Equipment Corp. or Sun Microsystems, or COMPAQ or lol Kaypro. Another important factor, even more important today, is that the barrier to entry for starting new tech ventures is very, very low. The enterprises that look so strong are in fact tied to massive sunk costs of aging garbage hardware.

The Internet of today is (was?) the home of the counter culture, but tech companies are the establishment. This inherent tension seems to be playing out now.

The culture war has moved into an economic attack phase. This type of economic "war" has happened many times in history in various forms. NGOs and hidden hand muckety mucks seem to be pushing their peons in tech to cut the ability of people like Alex Jones, who's basically an infotainer, and Sargon, another infotainer, to make money through internet platforms.

The institutions that seem so strong today can get terminally ill tomorrow. We're in the era of war and imperialism by other means. The Internet will probably split into a New World internet and a sad old world internet.

Pop Culture: Somebody Else's Daydreams

Drawings are a paper representation of how the mind's eye sees. Theatrical makeup and women's beauty makeup emphasize the same high information features of the face as the pencil and charcoal drawings on the wall of Chauvet Cave.

Comic books and animation are short hand representations of the forms encoded in our brains. They're like a stimulus for active memory and entering into a reverie state. Many other pop culture products follow a similar pattern.

The movie They Live is a dramatization of the outcome of an entire populace that's been immersed in someone else's daydream. Loss of the ability to actively imagine is essentially the same as a loss of will and ability to shape the future.

Glaciers and Money

I've been half assed interested in geology for the past few years mainly because our property is near the southern boundary of the furthest advance of the Cuyahoga and Grand River Lobes of the glaciers that covered northern Ohio about 14,800 years ago. When you spend lots of time outside, eventually the more subtle features of the landscape become more obvious and familiar due to long association which ends up providing a more concrete way to make sense of the argot of geologists.

Our property sits on the pile of debris left behind by the glaciers as they melted. Actually, it's the pile that's slumped up against other piles that were left against the more resistant bedrock just to the south of where we live. In the ice age, Ohio was alternately covered and uncovered by advancing and retreating ice of various depths. In my county, when the ice was deep enough, the whole county was covered, otherwise, it only advanced along the west and east flanks of the county through river valleys.

After years of looking at maps about different statistics, I eventually noticed that the unglaciated areas are more likely to be the lower income areas in the United States than glaciated areas. I haven't done more than a qualitative look at this data mainly because I've got better things to do, but every once in a while I circle around to this topic and try to explain it.

Correlation is not causation. The unglaciated portion of Ohio is substantially poorer than the rest of the state; generally the median household income is about 50% less than the glaciated portion of the state. The unglaciated portion of the state is in Appalachia and is extremely hilly. The glaciated portion of the state is flatter, and more importantly is connected to the Lake Erie Plain, which eventually hooks up with the Mohawk Valley of New York.

The Mowhawk Valley provided a flat route for east-west overland traffic (today it's the route for Interstate 90) and was a main thoroughfare in the 1800s. Similarly, obviously, the great lakes provided a water route to the interior of the US for decades prior to train routes and areas near trade routes more easily participate in trade and are wealthier.

Locally, the wealthiest census tract areas tend to be on geologic zone boundaries, which is maybe a more interesting effect to think about.

Courts, Dogmas, SJWs and Anti-Hallucination

Heimdal and the Bifrost Bridge

I've been sniffing out this shared hallucination topic for basically as long as I've been writing this blog. It's interesting to think about that reverie state as the Bifrost Bridge and the passageway to the realm of the gods. Indeed that reverie state is perhaps the most pleasant state of being for a human and is maybe the most powerful and creative way to be as a human.

It's also interesting to think about the people and institutions who attack this reverie state of consciousness. Many business environments are sterile and lack all the real-world amenities to move into this mode of daydreaming, even for their employees who are "creative" types. Courtrooms and other "formal" settings are seemingly designed for the purpose of jamming up access to this mode of thinking. Indeed, quite a lot of human "hierarchy" is aimed at destroying free access to the reverie state and shared  hallucination.

The puritans of yesteryear, or dogmatic religious people in general, just like the SJW of today attempts to put traps and tripwires along the Bifrost Bridge to keep people in a low state of consciousness so the will of some oligarch can be imposed on a mass of people.

Communing with the Gods Versus Paper Plans and Writing

From: here

Shifting states of consciousness is a way to travel among the "worlds". People do this all the time, of course. While you're reading this blog you're in a different mode of consciousness than when you're walking down a sidewalk on a cold and rainy day. When you watch a TV show or browse social media or craigslist, you're in a different mode of consciousness than when you read this blog.

In previous posts, I argued that the network of filters that process sensory information form the basis of "symbolic" representation of the natural world. Those filters and networks coevolved with the natural world over eons and are it's meaty-electrical reflection, so we're connected to the natural world via the matter of our nervous system and the molecular memory of our very matter and bones and the bacteria in our guts, but also to the information and concepts of the universe that are imprinted on everything. (cf Meno's slave)

When we can shift consciousness by an act of will we can move around to different "rooms" of this palace of the universe that's actually in us. We can connect that palace of thought to the real world by various means and share them by various means. Generally these means are low fidelity and low bandwidth, e.g. writing, poetry, and speech. The philosophers who devised the scientific method came up with one technique for creating a formal connection.

The shared hallucination method of things like dungeons and dragons or a church service are actually much higher fidelity. Maybe, just maybe its possible to take a whole rooms full of people into that shared hallucinatory state for the purpose of planning, even for very ordinary day-to-day purposes. With that method, it's not necessary to come up with the paper, symbolic representation of that experience.

Shared Hallucination versus Laws, Money and Bureaucracy

When you read a really captivating book, you enter into a low grade hallucination. A role playing game like dungeons and dragons is an exercise in shared hallucination. A church service is a similar exercise in shared hallucination. The shared hallucination state is pretty hard to carry into an activity, though, since it requires a relaxed and idle body.

Laws are the shared hallucination of legislators, really these days in the United States, 99% of the time they're the shared hallucination of corporate lawyers that are then passed into the hands of legislators in the states and the federal government. For the citizen, though, who has to follow them, they're the opposite of that shared hallucination state.

The shared hallucination state is probably a pretty good model for organization without money or bureaucracy. Dungeons and dragons might be a pretty good model for advanced planning and analysis.

Advanced D&D and Gamification of the World

The western world today thoroughly resembles a game. There's only a handful of things that people do that connect them to the real world mainly by flattening their consciousness so it's really in the moment.

Most of the "culture wars" nonsense that goes on reminds me of Dungeons and Dragons or LARPing. Almost all the disputes in the culture wars take place over completely imaginary topics, or over some academic's ramblings. Some people can spend their entire life in that realm of consciousness and never even know there are other realms.

If you've ever played dungeons and dragons, you know what it means to achieve that shared-hallucination state of consciousness. The entry and exit into that mindset is a very subtle. Is that the day-to-day state of nearly everyone in the western world? Is it a shared hallucination of a gamified world?

The New Imperialism

Since the end of the cold war, corporations/oligarchs have been trying to drive the whole world back to the time of the British East India Company, but rather than subjugate poor people in distant lands, the current model seems to be to subjugate everyone everywhere. Divide and conquer schemes that were once applied to the Company Raj in India are now being applied to western countries via mass migration.

The oligarchy of yesteryear (well its grandchildren anyway) pretends to stand in solidarity with whom they formerly subjugated and terrorized against "white people" without even a hint of irony or skepticism. In the colonial era, physical violence was employed by corporations against their subjects, but today that's not really necessary or practical. It's a lot easier to steal from people with laws, regulatory bodies, etc...

Very predictably, people are sorting into "sides" and getting angry at their fellow men rather than the people who divide them and exploit them.

Mass Media, the Catholic Church and Oligarchy

When I was a pre-teen geek the history topic that fascinated me the most was the migration period. There's a good collection of artifacts from that era in the Cleveland Museum of Art and the exhibit is arranged so you can easily see how the classical world went off a cliff and was replaced by something new and weird.

One of the great mysteries of that era is how and why christianity supplanted the religions of those peoples. I think the catholic church was really a crude version of the mass media of those times. The religions that it supplanted were shamanic and maybe radically local, that is, tied to local natural shrines and gods of places. By contrast Christianity is totally generic and otherworldly and not tied in any way, shape or form to Europe, and that's probably one of the reasons it actually spread.

The mass media, mass market corporate world of today is like a constricted everywhere locality. While for the people of pre-christian Europe, their tribe and town might be the only thing they would ever know. Ironically, the mass media, mass market world of today makes people care about sports teams and the goings on of world cities so they don't know the first thing about things in their immediate vicinity.

Possibly Christianity was a gateway to a world beyond that local one, maybe even literally. While today, shamanism seems appealing because it's a break with generic corporate pavement world.

Since the catholic church was a transnational entity at a time when tribes were the peak of organization, it could serve as an intermediary between them and serve as a notary of contracts and treaties and ratify deals among oligarchs of the day, and then also serve as the mass media of the time and propagandize the common people with the rightness and justice of those deals.

Symbols from Sense Filter Networks

The active filtering mechanisms of our senses and brain are the basis for symbolic representation of the world. More precisely, they are the concrete things which symbols arise from. The association of these mechanisms form symbols and concepts. For animals like our ducks, their symbolic representation of the world is probably immediate and rooted in what they're experiencing at any given moment.

They're constantly looking for food, or scanning the sky for potential predators. They'll often spot birds or aircraft that are high in the sky long before I notice them. They're also tuned into the chattering of all the local song birds and their predator warnings so in that sense, their vision and brain is linked with all the other birds that are loosely flocking around our property at any given time.

The ducks are constantly squawking and chirping and calling out to communicate amongst themselves and us. Their communication is always about their immediate experience, even when it's in the context of exploring or learning about something new in their environment.

By contrast, human speech based learning is usually aimed at contextualizing new experience or concepts in terms of prior experience and concepts. The immediate world barely even exists in the consciousness of many people, except in the context of playing a sport or driving a car or some physical activity.

It's a pretty good mental exercise to put yourself into that immediate sense processing mode from time to time.

Drawing How the Brain Represents Animals

I have a large print of the image at the right hanging on my wall. The images are from the
Chauvet Cave France and were made in the Aurignacian Era around 40,000 years ago.

The enlarged version shows more of the detail of the animal drawings than this JPG does. The animals are drawn with charcoal and are actually really good sketches that are shaded and the lines are emphasized in the same way contemporary artists draw realistic 2D projections of the 3D world.

A realistic sketch is probably a lesson in how our brain represents the natural world--animals in particular. The drawings made on the cave wall in charcoal emphasize boundaries and the most information dense (in the information theory sense) portions of the visual image. The thing an artist actually draws with a pencil is how their brain represents the world visually.

Information Density of Two Lions Image

The interesting thing to me is that the external world is actually in our brains. The minute differences in proportion of various animal heads, for example, is encoded there so we can recognize different species--some now extinct--of bears and lions in the cave painting. Our ancestors spent countless generations with them.

Are Culture "Wars" Bread & Circus Entertainment?

Since I'm not on Faceberg or Twatter anymore, I'm only occasionally exposed to culture "wars" news stories via random YouTube videos. I'm thinking it's a bad habit to pay too much attention to this stuff, but it is sort of compelling the same way watching sports is compelling.

For a while, I thought the present-day "clash" (if you can call it that) was unique because of social media, but in a lot of ways its a replay of earlier eras. It seems like left wing groups are perennial millenarian religious zealots, even if their religion is atheism. In an earlier era a figure like Carrie Nation was on a jihad against booze and wouldn't be out of place today with blue hair. Also, the temperance movement of the era was bankrolled by oligarchs of the day and was really a prototype wedge issue.

1800s American Idealism and a Mania for Institutions

In the early 1800s, shortly after newly opened territories were opened for settlement, people in the United States went on a bender of ideological and religious experimentation of various kinds. Several towns and cities and colleges in Ohio, for example, were basically founded by religious leaders (aka cult leaders). While today we associate religious zeolots with socially conservative ideas, many of those 19th century Christian groups espoused what we think of today as progressive ideas.

They also went on a bender of creating institutions and groups that sought to put ideals into practice, which really meant that they wanted to legislate and regulate individuals and engineer "a people". It's not surprising they turned to the Prussian Education system as a model for schools in the United States since they were trying to "solve" a similar problem, that is engineer a unified country from many disparate groups and individuals.

The progressives then and now tend to focus on groups and institutions like corporations rather than individual's pursuing his own goals or following a particular path toward understanding.

Neoliberal Central Command Sent a New Memo On Migration

In the past couple of weeks John Kerry and Hillary Clinton started to criticize mass migration, specifically migration into the EU, as a catalyst of populist backlash. I'm sure if I bothered looking, I'd be able to find them making heartfelt pleas for Europe to accept as many migrants as possible in the recent past.

Those people are actors who have no beliefs of their own, so where's HQ? Who's actually in charge of these empty suits and mouthpieces?

Populist Empire?

When you read about the north american colonial period one of the themes that pops up frequently is manufactured goods were often made in the mother country and the monetization of the raw materials of the New World was made possible by import of manufactured and/or luxury goods, and no competing local industries. Money, and therefore credit were attached to the mother nation and its trade monopolies which led to deliberate hobbling of the colonies' economies.

It seems like innovation is inherently at odds with authoritarianism and oligarchy. (The Japanese Empire is a notable exception to this notion.) The rising tide of techno-totalitarianism across the western world (and in spades in China) is really pretty interesting from this point of view.

The thing I wanted to write about in this post, though, is the contradictions of the United States neoliberal empire and how the populist backlash against it could go down a dark path. The imperialism of the present day US is carried out by and on behalf of corporations. It takes the form of exploitation of less organized nations' people and environment for the production of goods abroad. It really represents a near total ownership of governments all over the world by corporate interests. The empire really doesn't sit well with the nation's long held ideals, though, but maybe it's idealistic to think the average American is attached to them either.

The populist backlash against corporatism is a long time coming and at the present time has very little positive shape or any specific agenda or goals. It's pretty easy to imagine a lot of bad potential outcomes. For example, rather than promote freedom around the world and see corporate exploitation of people in Asia or Latin America as a problem, we could end up with a populist empire that seeks to exploit them more on behalf of a bread and circuses mob run amok.

The Cash Economy Versus Crypto or Gold

When I was in high school, I had a good friend whose family had a lot of assets in the cash economy and they conducted a lot of business that way--doing barter and trade and buying things with big wads of $100 bills. If you're able to start young and earn income outside the banking system and the gaze of tax authorities, you can actually build a large pile of tangible wealth in the form of vehicles, tools, collectibles, antiques, etc... that's an alternative to putting money in a bank. Some of that stuff is relatively easy to liquidate and if you're shrewd, you can even make a profit on trades. However, if you're not shrewd, or need money in a hurry, you can lose big.

Precious metals and crypto currencies are supposed to serve as alternatives to cash but in practice it can be difficult to liquidate precious metals without paying a significant fee, and it is also rare to find someone who will take PM's in exchange for goods or services. (I did see a craigslist ad for a tractor that had a 20% discount for precious metals purchase.) In my area, only about 1/1000th of craigslist ads are marked to indicate they accept crypto.

PMs and crypto are, to me, akin to stock or commodity trading where there is 0% chance that you can have any knowledge advantage or any other type of advantage versus anyone else in that market. (I stopped trading stocks a few years ago for that reason) With tangible assets, though, you can gain actual useful knowledge and either add value to a thing or at minimum have an advantage in a trade.

Lessons for Cryptocurrency Enthusiasts from Ohio Company (1749-1763)

Empire and Oligarchy are essentially the same thing. Can there really be one without the other?

The settlement of Ohio is one of the more interesting chapters in US history because it's really like a microcosm of world history. The Ohio Company was formed to begin settling what was then the Northwest Territory of colonial America. The french conducted trade with indian tribes in the interior including the Ohio territory, but the French presence was pretty feeble and was contested by the British and the American colonists.

While the British had their fangs in the neck of the New World it was useful to irritate and subvert the French so it was useful to their interests to promote British settlement in what were nominally "French" territories. However after the Seven Years War, it seems like the British Empire sought to bottle up the colonists and stop their advance into the western frontier. That was probably their policy all along, and was a goal they stated after the war of 1812. The leaders of the Ohio company were really playing at Great Game politics rather than conducting their own business or advancing their own interests.

The nature of trade, especially overseas trade, tends toward concentration and centralization via control of markets. The very feeble British and especially French presence in North America was sufficient to control trade and markets for a long time. The remote oligarchs in Britain and France managed to extract great wealth from colonies through a feeble spiderweb network of businesses. It seems like oligarchy's interests tend to become past-oriented as they try to maintain monopolies and extract wealth through what are basically broad based taxes, e.g. church tithes, church indulgences, usury, monopoly of commodities like salt or oil, etc...

New technology or new worlds, like the age of sail colonies, or the Internet, upset those systems and threaten the schemes of monopolists. Crypto looks quite a bit like the frustrated schemes of the Ohio Company. As long as it fits into the plans of the entrenched oligarchies of the day it gains users, but if it competes with their monopolies it gets attacked by their lackies in the media and the government.

Natural Information: Symbols and Storage Systems

In the previous post I noted that a key difference between natural information and systemic representation of bits in something like a telecommunication systems is formal systems are constrained in time and space while natural information isn't. Animals, obviously, are contrained in time and space and only perceive a filtered version of natural information, and maybe that's what a symbol for animals and humans really is. The active filtering networks of our senses that feed information to the central nervous system are the things that are natural versions of written symbols or words.

When you see a squirrel, for example, you really don't see a mere array of pixels like a digital camera does, rather the nervous system has some built-in representations of a generic animal and probably even some built in representation of a generic "squirrel". If you're not around squirrels very often, for example, you probably won't even perceive the visual differences of different sub-species.

It seems plausible that those built-in representations form the basis of language and the language of our brains and memory. That's probably why our memories are so bad and prone to distortion compared to a photograph.

When I try to recall a squirrel I saw yesterday, my mind's eye really sees squirrelness.

Modem Symbols and Natural Information

Information theory is a new field. It really only dates to my grandfather's era and I'm a child of the 1970s. It came about as big telecommunications systems started spreading around the United States and good mathematical models were needed to engineer them. Information theory is really a statistical model of symbol transmission. Most modern telecommunication systems use modulators and demodulators plus some encoding method (really very complicated and sparse alphabets) to move strings of bits. Typically the bits are represented by a modulated carrier signal where groups of 1's and 0's are represented as regular perturbations of the carrier; Old timey audio-frequency modems transmitted data in the audible range (e.g. 300 Hz) and you could hear the signal. Information theory describes the probability of the symbols being decoded correctly based on signal-to-noise ratio.

Natural information is different. If you drop a sugar cube in a bathtub, for example, the concentration of sugar in the water will form a gradient. That is, the concentration will be higher near the cube than further away until a number of hours or minutes elapses. The gradient is information. Is it in any way symbolic in information theory terms?

No. The concept of a symbol is really a formalized expression of human language--really it's a systemic representation of writing--a mark. One of the topics I wanted to get at in the earlier post about information and scales is that telecom systems are really, really specific and the engineering concepts apply mostly to representing 1's and 0's within specific extremely constrained systems in terms of time (frequency really) and space and method.

Natural information is not constrained, which may be the chief reason it can't be symbolic. Symbolic really strongly implies space and time constraints that are exemplified by electronic telecommunication systems.

Narcissism and Frontiers

There are 1001 hero cults. For many boys, day to day life in childhood is spent soaking in hero cults of sports, comic books, and TV. For some, training begins for a chance to shine forth in the light of natural justice and achieve victory and be a hero, at least on a small scale.

There's almost nothing sweeter than the thrill of winning against a field of competitiors who all prepared and worked hard to try to win. This feeling is experienced by proxy by sports fans. Day-to-day real world life, though, is almost entirely devoid of such opportunities to compete and win, and often times naked competition in the human world is very destructive. People who participate in sports as adults often transform the competitive elements of their sport into mechanisms for self-improvement as the realities of life and age set-in.

If a true understanding is really achieved by creating a mind that's a reflection of nature, then the narcissist or egotist's understanding of the world is very distorted, and the egotist is, rather ironically, very easy to dupe and exploit.

Simply creating a venue for someone to be "special" and give them an award of a cheap medal will motivate hundreds, or maybe thousands of people to strive even at the risk of their own life. (See Napoleon's quote) 

A frontier provides a "natural" test of men, although the "struggle" for life on the frontier is probably framed in a hero cult delusion, too.

Funhouse World

A decade ago, there was an article about a father who doped his young son so the kid could win inline skating competitions. That story came up in the context of performance enhancing drug distribution rings in the US that were being busted, as well as Tour de France doping. It was apparent that the illicit market for performance enhancing drugs was substantially larger than that for their legitimate medical uses.

Today, of course, media celebrates parents who do what East German coaches did to athletes back in the 1980s and start dosing their pre-teen kids with testosterone or estrogen and put them on a course that will require lifelong treatments that cost hundreds of dollars a pop. Media appeals to the narcissism of parents and their children and gives them a way to escape the humdrum normalcy of their actual day to day life by going to a doctor and taking an injection.

There are a million and one ways for parents, even well meaning parents, to FUBAR their children and there are many industries who happily wreck children's lives in various ways while making the opposite claims about their intentions. Are pharmaceutical corporations any different in kind or degree than other industries? Not really. Actually one of the great disservices of fiction, TV/movies is to depict evil corporate heads as really slick and fancy-pants, and implicitly rare, rather than common and banal.

When this mania passes, either because this market saturates, or harmful side effects of frequent hormone use become obvious, how many parents and grown children will regret their choice as they step out of the mania-decision-making context into the harsh light of day?

One of the great tropes of sci-fi and horror movies is the Fun House that's actually an entrance to a slaughterhouse. What an apt metaphor for this world of lies!

Information Storage, Transmission, Operations On Multiple Scales

Data and his "brother" Lore

One of the most powerful teaching and learning tools is the thing that's "not there". Commander Data in Star Trek is a great example of that method of learning through stories. He's the man who's not human. His role in the story of TNG is to create a void that can never be filled even with repeated asking of: "what does it mean to be human?"

Computers and formal language systems serve a very similar role in improving understanding. In an effort to make simulacra of intelligence, they create similar voids that beg the questions of "what is intelligence and what is information?"

Formal language systems like computer programs are like an obsidian mirror reflection of natural systems of information storage and transmission. (Maybe they're derived from systems of representation in our brains which are apart from the primary information storage in our brain.) By studying the formal langauge system in natural information terms, and vice versa, it might be possible to come up with a third mode that fixes the deficiencies in formal language systems.

If we start with the premise that information and intelligence are omnipresent, then the woods on our property must have their own intelligence, but it's also extremely unlikely that we could understand that intelligence in its own or its full terms. That said, there are probably some aspects of intelligence that are universal and that can be aped with formal language models.

One of the big problems we have before we can even get started on such a model is to understand the time (really inverse time: frequency) and spatial scale that something like a woods stores information so you can represent it with a symbolic version of the same.

Credit Tightening for Tech Companies

Tech Bubble 2.0 appears to be in the process of popping (aka making credit more scarce for tech companies). I say this based on first hand, albeit anecdotal evidence.

There's no AI, there's only I

Intelligence, like information, is apparently a property of our universe that arises from the relationship of its elements. The human brain embodies this aspect of the universe. Our brain has a network of associations and structurally encoded information (i.e. knowledge  cultural, genetic, and molecular) that allows us to think and to understand. Other networks on different scales of time and size are operating all the time on Earth and throughout the Universe as a whole.

Computer code is a bad analogy for how our brain operates. Our brain is more like the structures that emerge from running code and those structures are quite apart from the program. The analogy of how the mechanics toolbox stores information is a way to illustrate this.

I don't think AI, in the sense it's popularly understood, is possible. That is, you can't write a computer program that manifests intelligence, rather you could embody intelligence in a machine or a computer the same way nature emodied intelligence in us. (This is really the premise of SkyNet in The Terminator movies.)

 However, I think the fundamental problem is that there's no way to create a formal language representation of the information that's stored inside us that makes our brain work. Since the world doesn't operate in formal langauge code, you can't encode it with formal language (a computer program).

Great Paper on Egyptian Astromythology

The Celestial River: Identifying the Ancient Egyptian Constellations by Alessandro Berio

Egregore and Not Getting What You Want

One recurring theme in this blog is that a system has a life of its own, or more precisely lives through the people who make it work. When you try to solve your problems with a system, you end up getting more of what the system wants, than what you wanted from your ostensible invention. You invite a god into this plane of existence.

The moderns thought they replaced the gods. Modernity is really an attempt at engineering social and economic systems from a rational basis, rather than rely on cultural traditions, which in the worst cases were long standing means of oligarchic control. Rationalism replaces the voice of received traditional wisdom in an attempt to free human beings. (It really frees them to engage in rational enquiry)

The moderns model of reality is the natural world is entirely passive and can be endlessly modified according to human whim and that everything is isolated and malleable on its own. (This is really exemplified by transhumanists.) In the worst cases, this belief is applied to nations and people, which some believe can be modified and shaped according to the whims of social engineers, and the most malignant case is that social engineers create a new religion and enslave people to ideologies like race supremacy and communism.

The egregore is a better and more subtle model for what actually happens. The engineer really builds a bridge for a new god to cross into our plane. It seems like older modes of design and engineering were possibly more conscious of this. The amish (again with the amish) skepticism of new technologies and systems is really another way to prevent malignant gods from entering into our world.

The Amish, the Cathars, and Lefty Racists

Last weekend we drove out to Mesopotomia, Ohio (aka Mespo) which is a small, rural town in the Grand River Valley. It's not too far away from where we live, but it's like a different world because of the high proportion of Amish people, and the rural landscape. When you visit a place like that, you can really see how civilization is a thing of its own that exists through a people since the Amish economy and day-to-day life is distinct from that of their immediate neighbors. The thing is really like the God of those people.

It's easier to imagine the circumstances of the Crusades against the Cathars in the 13th century when you visit a place like Mespo. In the world conception of the thuggish Catholic Church and Monarchies of the day, a distinct people and religion like that of the Cathars or the Amish today was anathema, since it represented a threat against their civic and religious order. (In WWI, Hutterites who refused to serve in the US military were tortured to death in prison)

Lefty identity politics is pretty weird when you contrast how the Amish maintain their distinct culture within a larger sea of people with no apparent sense of victimhood, i.e. being a loser. If you want to maintain a distinct way of life, which you believe is better for you and yours, then you have to actively maintain it. Lefty identity politics is weirdly passive and spoiled-child entitled.

The constant complaint and resentment against "white people" is really like that of the Catholic Church against the Cathars, except it's more the other way around in terms of population and power. The lefty racist blames all his problems on the white man instead of just living his own life and seeking after his own interests, which is exactly what whiny white klansmen do.

Three Political Parties in the US of A

The Internet changed how election propaganda and political discussion takes place in the USA in recent years. It seems like the Internet accelerated a split in both parties, where the libertarians with any affiliation with the GOP got fed up with the neocons and the socialists and more libertarian oriented people who voted for democrats finally got fed up with the war  mongers and corporate lackies in the blue party.

Trump actually managed to establish a new coalition as a sort of third party candidate that used the apparatus of the GOP to win the election. Bernie Sanders' campaign was actually pretty similar, but he got bought off by the Clintons at some point.

Maybe over time, we end up with three parties in the US and the Internet breaks up the major political parties the same way it is breaking up the MSM. It seems like the three groups are pretty stable: various flavors of libertarian, rino/dino corporation party,various shades of communist.

The Middle of Everything

A widesoread mythological theme is that man is in-between or in the middle of the celestial realms of the gods and the world of matter. "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" take place in Middle Earth. The plane of man in the norse myths is Midgard.

We are animated matter. We are the intercessor between the material world and the spirit realms.

Champagne Socialists and Communist Dictators and the Star Trek Future

Woman with Japanese Skull WW2 War Trophy

Star Trek: The Next Generation is on Netflix and has been remasted in HD (with the original TV aspect ratio, though). The main premise of the show is that human beings evolve and our civilizations evolve as we acquire knowledge. In fact the show almost completely conflates technological progress with "social" progress. Have we really progressed and become  more refined or has  our brutality just shifted around and moved into dark out of sight out of mind places? Really, WWI and WWII, were made possible by industrial technology and were the serial application of it to mass slaughter. The death toll of those two wars is off the charts in human history and the total war doctrines of the great powers in WWII was as barbaric as any Mongol Hoarde.

Could global level rational cooperation among all people ever really work? Many of the people who are always trying to sell the idea are champagne socialists who preach universal "sharing" from atop piles of money. Of course, the "promise" of forced cooperation inevitably turns to slavery and worse. Socialism seems pretty un-clever.

Humans are capable of both cooperation and competition, obviously, but in Star Trek world the need for competition seems to be obviated by the super-duper sources of energy they have. So all the people, at least of starfleet, participate in a rigid hierarchical (but presumably meritocratic) militaristic organization, which is actually a pretty weird ingredient of the fantasy world of future atlantis.

Is global cooperation a pre-requisite for advancing technologically or in other ways? Probably not. Not in the Star Trek or globalist way certainly.

Steering People With Aesthetics

In the 1980s culture wars, the game of Dungeons and Dragons regularly featured as a villain that was tempting children into the ways of satan. My dweebie friends and my dweebie young teen self played the game on a weekly basis. D&D was really like an extension of sci-fi and fantasy novels and an exercise in shared active imagination, which children are generally pretty good at through years of practice in games and playing with toys. Religions are actually pretty similar on that score. A congregation and a people share a base of imaginative stories that are elaborated over time, but for the typical churchgoer, the religion "game" is more passive. I think the critique of D&D by christian conservatives of the day was actually correct in some ways.

D&D grew out of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings and works by writers of the Lovecraft circle who were tied into Theosophy. The world of fantasy, for them, was real and malleable and where the future could be made.

Many people, but especially children, evaluate information through aesthetics. Since they don't have any actual experience, they can't make judgements any other way. If a kid sees a cool car, they'll react to its shape, the sound the engine makes, and how shiny it is. If an adult sees a politician on a stage surrounded by a crowd, they'll react to the apparent social circumstances of a person being "important" rather than evaluate whatever nonsense is being said. The play violence of kids pretending to be knights or cowboy gunfighters seems like the model lay people have of wars.

An aesthetic understanding is more primal than attempts at rational understanding and probably relies on evolutionary "memories" that people have. The chrome and cooling fins and shiny paint of motorcycles conjure up the slick colors and patterns of reptiles and birds. Leathers and helmets of street racers cover up their human features, which as far as animals go are pretty jumbled and muddled, and reduce them to a simple clear forms.

Culture Wars and Focus on "Cultural Marxist" Issues as a Distraction

Do you remember how similar the "left" and "right" wing critiques and observations about the federal government were around 2008? Much of the commentary on the financial system by a left wing academic like Michael Hudson and right wing youtuber's complaints about the Federal Reserve were interchangable or at least complementary. Similarly, the critique of imperialism and foreign wars by the USA was similar if not complementary.

A few years later much of the audience for that commentary is wrapped up in culture wars bullshit. Was that engineered as a diversion? The "alt right" seems like it was entirely fabricated. The audience who opposed wars and financial crime ended up worrying about white genocide or commie dweebs on college campuses or nonsense like Bruce Jenner's sex change.

I didn't follow any of the development of the alt left over the past few years, but it wouldn't be a surprise if that followed a parallel path.

There's no "Economy of Scale"

The creek that runs through our property changed course a couple weeks ago after a short rainstorm. The creek bed is in a deep ravine and drops 100' over about 1100 feet. Usually there's just a trickle of water in it, and in a typical rainstorm it gets to be about ankle deep. A couple weeks ago, it must have gotten dammed up for a while by a log, which finally gave way and sent a lot of water down the creek at once. The water scrubbed out the creek bed and ended up rerouting the creek by cutting a trench through what people in this area call a "hogback", which is a narrow ridge that extends out from a hill down to a river or creek. The creek only has to erode about 10' deeper until it hits sandstone. (I wonder if we'll still be alive to witness that.)

Over the course of years creeks and rivers wander all over as they erode new paths and silt up old ones. When there is man made infrastructure nearby, people will build walls and erosion control structures (like piles of rocks) to forestall the encroachment of water. In more extreme cases, people build dams and reroute rivers for cities' water supplies. 

When you divide the big costs of big infrastructure projects over many people and compare the cost to install a huge pipe versus a bunch of small ones, or one giant dam versus a bunch of individual's flood control measures you can say there is an "economy of scale". Of course there's an inverse massive loss of a resource, (e.g. California Water Wars) and "perpetual" maintenance cost to maintain some structure or system that's fighting nature everyday over a huge area and a wide range of conditions that can't ever be anticipated by engineers.

The "need" for flood control or similar civil engineering projects stems from how people own land in the United States. We generally own a chunk of land that's defined by a survey and ultimately related to its position on the globe, rather than a right to a use of land in some region. (in some cases, property rights are actually deliniated along resource use lines rather than geographical lines). And it seems lilke such property rights are really tied to the concept of work making the land more organized and valuable, e.g. building a barn or a house.

Why Normie World Freaks Out All The Time

Some people thought "social media" was a new thing, even though people had been engaging in the same type of shit posting and discussions since dial up modem days. I used to participate in a philosophy forum in the early 1990s. I talked with a woman from what was formerly called Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) for a long time about some philosophy topic and then found out she was a hardcore anti-black sort of comic book charicature white nationalist. I tried my best to argue that identity politics is for losers, but my arguments were pretty feeble in the face of her family being dispossed.

If you're a theory-person and are more analytically minded, extreme points of view are "interesting" and worth investigation or study even if you totally disagree and you can even have empathy for someone who holds a point of view that the mainstream thinks is abhorrent. Most people, though, aren't analytically minded and form opinions based on aesthetic and political considerations. For whatever reason they think even hearing a contrary opinion threatens their politics. The ideas you find out in the wild of the Internet are threatening to them the same way some people are afraid of coyotes or wolves.

It is appalling to see how quickly rank and file democrats knee-jerked to Internet censorship as a reaction to a lifeling influence peddlar shitbag politician losing an election. I guess it's no surprise though, since people similarly allowed more government interference in their lives after 9/11.

Regulating Social Media = Dead Social Media

Faceberg was already in decline since the cool-kid people were bored of it, and now grifter politicians and establishment cretins want it to be "regulated" since the election. In the old days, regulation sort of cemented an industry status quo in place, at least temporarily, as it stifled competition, but networking techniques and technology are so ephemeral that whatever lawyers and politicians dream up will be inapplicable to whatever iteration of "social media" or whatever it will be called comes next. The Internet might be the home of a permanent couonterculture. It will always be the wild west. Yippeee kai yay.

Deals With the Devil

We're watching "The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina" on Netflix, which promotes satanism to 'tween girls. I think my interpretation of the moderns religious belief is on track (The Christian Luciferians). By now, I can even sum it up in a few words: the world is fallen and literally godless (abandoned by god) and only through work can it be redeemed, i.e. made amenable to human needs and wants. (This religious view is depicted on shows like Supernatural.) The belief in linear history and progress is really an inversion of the Christian worldview where the world was fallen, but was redeemed already by Jesus.

COINTELPRO Social Media and Dumb Ass Violent People

A few years ago Rolling Stone did an article on FBI duping people into attempted terrorist attacks. Something like 95% of the terrorist plots the FBI foiled had been planned and prompted by FBI informants. In the social media and alt media era, I think the tactics have changed so the stupid and violent people are prompted and nudged by social media personalities on the "left" and the "right". Some of those are agents of the government or NGOs. Unlike the 1960s intelligence operations which often involved direct infiltration of groups, the social media campaigns are multiple degrees removed from the people who they're inciting, which seems irresponsible at best.

What's the purpose of all this? It's probably meant to justify bigger budgets and power grabs.

Good ancient internet article on the subject.

Hours Worked in US and Real Wages

The quality of life for many people in the USA has been steadily declining since I was a kid in the late 1970s. Today, if you're not a professional worker, or a skilled tradesman life is pretty hard in spite of all the improvements in productivity, etc... over the time period. It's made even worse by predatory behavior of many institutions and also, seemingly, a loss of organizations to support average people and even a loss of familial knowledge about how to protect their own interests.

When I was a kid it was really common for local stores to have more of a 9-5 schedule, for example, so people who worked in retail or service jobs could have a life. Basically every store in my home town was closed on Sunday, too and had shorter weekend hours.

In the early 1970s, the United States started deregulating the banking system. Previously, banks were restricted geographically and were kept out of certain financial activities (like underwriting corporate securities) as a result of the Great Depression.

It seems, subsequently, the United States has been organized to reduce the share of the average person in the economy by bankers, corporations, and their politicians.